PublicPersonnel’s Salary Survey Program was designed to facilitate the collection, analysis and   presentation of wage and salary information used by Personnel Directors, Elected Boards, and Commissions when making and approving compensation recommendations.  Basic information is entered using the Set-up and Administration screens.  Thereafter, a variety of selection formats are used to promote the uniform collection and reporting of data. 

The program is divided into five sections. In the System Set-Up and Administration area the System Administrator will define "home agency" values such as your agency name, address and contact information, the staff available to work on the surveys, and information about the classes you include in your surveys.  You can also enter the name, address and contact information for outside agencies that will be participating in your surveys and define the non-salary compensation that you will be collecting.

Once you have entered the required system data, you are ready to create a new survey. After you create a unique name and survey Id. for your survey you will be asked to designate a lead person and assign staff to work on the survey.  Using the dropdown format, you can select the participating agencies you will be contacting in your survey and you can choose the benchmark classes and non-salary compensation to inculde in your survey.

The Perform Survey Section is where you will enter the data you collect from participating agencies.   First select the agency you wish to work on.  Notice that the contact information for that agency is displayed.   Next, choose a benchmark class you want salary data for.  Salary data can be collected, per hour, per week, bi-weekly, per month, or per year.  You can choose how the salary data will be displayed when you run your report. 

It is not necessary or desirable to enter non-salary compensation for each class in your survey.   Non-salary compensation (like vacation time) is usually provided to groups of employees based on their (bargaining) unit allocation.  The program provides a dropdown menu to specify the unit a class is allocated to.  This allows you to enter the values once and link the values to other classes in the same unit.

Once you have collected all the data for your survey, you are ready to generate reports.  Salary data and non-salary compensation can be reported by class or by agency.  You can also choose to include a cover sheet for your report, as well as, a list of participating agencies, a list of classes surveyed, the
type(s) of non-salary compensation collected and a list of staff that worked on the survey.

If you have collected salary data for a class in previous surveys, you can report the results using the salary trends reporting function in the Generate Reports Section.  The program stores the data collected during each survey and can combine the data from several surveys into a single report.  Identifying salary trends over time is essential to the development of sound salary allocation recommendations.

The system also provides an Export Data feature that permits you to create files that contain the information you entered into the Salary Survey system.   These files may be exported into popular spreadsheet and word processing programs for detailed statistical analysis.